Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the title of a paper by Bodnar et al. 2023. A summary of this interesting paper is below. Overview of general practitioners in the UK Under the English National Health Service (NHS) program, …patients register with a single general practice that acts as the gatekeeper to most other NHS services, including non-emergency hospital…
That is the question asked by a recent NBER working paper by Chandra et al. (2023). This question is important for a variety of reasons. First, quality measure data collection is expensive. Saraswathula et al. 2023 found that Johns Hopkins Hospital had to report 162 unique quality metrics, and the cost for collecting these data…
That is the question asked by a recent paper by Nikpay et al. (2023). The authors begin by describing the magnitude of the 340B program: The 340B drug discount program is designed to lower drug costs and increase drug profits for safety-net providers, called “covered entities,” by entitling them to discounts on drugs for all…
Just this year a majority of Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan. While these plans are popular with patients, I recently wrote that some rural providers are refusing to accept Medicare Advantage due to low reimbursement. A recent article from Kaiser Health News finds that provider frustration with Medicare Advantage is spreading to…
A helpful article from Mattingly et al. (2023) describes history, business practices, economics, and policy for pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). Part of this article explains how PBMs make money. They claim there are three primary avenues. Rebate retention. Plan sponsors pays the list price of the drug net of rebates and discounts received. PBMs are…
Biosimilar drugs for biologic treatments are analogous to generic drugs for branded small molecules. Switching to biosimilars after biologic patent expiry can save payers and patients money. Why doesn’t it happen more often? There are a variety of reasons but a paper by Bond et al. (2023) argues that the 340B program incentivizes hospitals to…
This is a question that can be answered empirically but doing so is challenging. While cross-country comparisons are feasible for comparing public and private health care provisions, often there are many other differences between health care systems across country. Within any given country, there is significant selection bias in terms of who receives public vs.…
That is the title from an interesting paper by Andreyeva et al. (2023). The abstract is below: Between 2000 and 2020, the share of US hospital bed capacity under multi-unit firms (systems) increased from 58% to 81% – a rapid corporatization of a sector with $1.3 trillion in annual spend. However, little is known about…
There has been much research showing that fee-for-service (FFS) leads to increased provision of medical services and capitation leads to decreased provision of medical services. My own research shows that there are system-wide effects and that the impact of capitation for primary care physicians on services may depend on whether specialists are also reimbursed via…
According to a paper by Smith et al. 2023, the answer is ‘no’. The authors use data from AHRQ’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) State Inpatient Data, Hospital Cost Reporting Information System Data, Office of Pharmacy Affairs Information System Data, and American Hospital Association Annual Survey for 15 states between 2008 to 2014. The…